Missouri Army National Guard’s 203rd aids flood victims

Southwest Missouri citizen soldiers have joined the fight on the eastern side of the state to stave off the flooding Mississippi River.

Michelle L. Pippin

Southwest Missouri citizen soldiers have joined the fight on the eastern side of the state to stave off the flooding Mississippi River.

The Missouri Army National Guard’s 203rd Engineer Battalion, headquartered in Joplin, has sent 50 soldiers with heavy equipment — including loaders, bobcats and dump trucks — to the town of Winfield where flood waters are expected to crest at 11 feet above flood stage on Wednesday.

2nd Lt. Jim Avery with the 1141st Engineer Company is leading the Southwest Missouri soldiers who hale from all of the battalion’s companies located in Kansas City, Carthage, Joplin, Pierce City, Neosho and Anderson. The additional soldiers will augment the 100 members of the 220th Engineer Company from Festus, who have been working for the past week to maintain levees between Louisiana, Mo., and Winfield.

“Our mission is to protect the Pine Oak levee and do whatever we can to make sure it holds,” Avery said. “The 220th has done a great job keeping it together, but I understand they’ve had a few problem areas arise, so we’ll be working in 24-hour operations to ensure there are no leaks.”

Soldiers with the 203rd will be monitoring the Pine Oak levee, where Guardsmen and volunteers have been working hard to fill 50,000 additional sandbags needed to fortify the 2.5-mile earthen berm levee. If the levee gives way to flood waters, 160 homes, several businesses and 3,000 acres of farmland will flood, said Andy Binder of the Lincoln County Emergency Operations Command.

“All the primary levees in Lincoln County have been breached or overtopped,” Binder said. “Pine Oak is the only levee that’s held. It’s the last of the remaining dry land in eastern Lincoln County.”

Across Lincoln County, 70,000 acres of farmland and more than 300 homes have flooded, with the potential for 400 more to be affected before the river is expected to crest in the area by Wednesday. Soldiers with the 203rd will be filling sandbags, repairing leaks in the levee and working to repair sand boils — dirt-mound formations produced by extreme water pressure — that have developed across the Pine Oak levee over the past 24 hours.

Missouri National Guard citizen-soldiers and airmen have been mobilized in the communities of Clarksville, Hannibal, Canton, West Quincy, LaGrange, Winfield, St.
Charles and Alexandria. Missions include sandbagging operations, levee monitoring and manning traffic control points.